Fable III Understone Quest Pack DLC review

The fate of a people is in your hands. Again

So you’ve conquered Albion, gained the love or ire of your subjects, tracked downevery key,gnome,book, andflower, and you still want more? Lionhead Studios figured as much and released the Understone Quest Pack to further fuel your need to interact with strangers, run fetch quests to gain their affection and fight hoards of reanimated skeletons. Oh, and you get some free new weapons too.

There are three new quests included in this DLC: Shooting Range, The Wheel of Misfortune and The Voice.

Shooting Range and The Wheel of Misfortune aren’t anything particularly noteworthy. In the first you return the Mercenary Camp to find that their new leader has set up an amusement area for travelers, a way for his band of misfits to go legit if you will. The shooting range is where you can test your accuracy and speed in blasting cut-outs. Headshots grant more points and rarer cut-outs of Logan can get knocked down for even more. After your time is up your score is tallied and prizes are awarded. You’ll find that you’ll need to do really well in order to earn the two pistols (Money Shot and Black Dragon) offered up as prizes.

The Wheel of Misfortune brings you back to Reaver’s mansion in Millfields. This arena-based challenge is the same one you had to go through during the masquerade portion of the game, only this time you’re scored based on how many enemies you can defeat without getting hit. The higher your multiplier is the more points you’ll score for each enemy killed. After three rounds of randomly selected enemies the fourth round returns to the main room where you’ll fight a hodgepodge of different creatures. Like Shooting Range the higher your score is the better your prize is. These prizes include the Dirty Harriet revolver that can be upgraded by killing 200 men and Dead Ned’s Revolver.

Above: Understone’s unofficial motto: Leave the sunblock at home!

The meat and potatoes of this DLC, however, is the Voice quest that unlocks an entirely new town underneath the streets of Bowerstone Industrial. A factory owner charges you with determining the source of a disembodied voice echoing through his building. Through this process you’ll encounter several groups of reanimated skeletal remains of Hobbes and wolves on your way to determining the source. Upon entering the town of Understone you’ll discover the impetus behind the booming voice that, up until that point, was predicting your demise the entire journey through. After revealing the mystery behind the voice you’ll be left with a moral choice typical to Fable III where the fate of the people of Understone will be thrust upon you.

If purchased after the main story of Fable III is completed, The Voice is remarkably easy. Hoards of enemies are readily dispatched with fully upgraded skills and the final “boss” (if it can even be called that) is no tougher than the average Balverine. While the moral choice presented at the end of the quest does add some interest, it feels like an afterthought if the main story is already done.

For 400 Microsoft points the Understone Quest Pack is a worthwhile purchase for those of us who could not get enough of Albion and its people, but for the majority of players there isn’t any one thing in it that makes this pack a must-have.